Lucie Arnaz once described what it was like to follow in her mother’s footsteps as an actress. Arnaz is the daughter of I Love Lucy stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
Together, the two helped pioneer the modern sitcom and broke down barriers in Hollywood.
While Lucille Ball said her kids had a choice about whether or not they wanted to be in the entertainment industry, Lucie Arnaz pursued it. She knew she was following in the footsteps of two massive celebrities whose creation of I Love Lucy would be hard to match.
Arnaz Would Have Taken a Different Path Without Her Connections
“If it wasn’t for her I suppose I would have gone the regular route and gone to college and studied theatre,” Arnaz said of her Mother in an interview with Arlene Henderson. But while the decision to pursue acting didn’t have everything to do with her parents, it certainly made it more reachable.
“I was lucky to an extent because my mother had a store I could work in. She had a show and you could get little parts and learn by doing and then eventually she changed her format and asked my brother and I to play the children on the show,” she explained.
But while that’s great on paper, she also knew people would understand she got the part because of her relation to the I Love Lucy stars.
“That was a huge big step and a wonderful opportunity, but you also have to know that people are going to say ‘Well duh, that is why you got the part. Your mother was the star of the show,’ and there was no arguing with that. It’s exactly right!”
Arnaz compared it to following a different type of business.
“You know, If you want to be a plumber, and your father has a plumbing business and he says ‘come work for me!’ That isn’t something you are going to turn down, right? But then you have to go back and kind of prove yourself by getting the right education and everything else and it’s twice as hard because you are someone’s daughter that didn’t go to school, but went up through the ranks, so it has its pros and cons.”
Lucie Arnaz Didn’t Want To Be On Lucille Ball’s Project after ‘I Love Lucy’
While Lucille Ball is perhaps most famous for I Love Lucy, the show Arnaz is likely referring to in her comments is Here’s Lucy. Arnaz, who was fifteen at the time, didn’t want to be on the show. She was genuinely serious about acting and wanted to be good if she was going to face all of the inevitable criticism.
Eventually, however, she agreed to do the TV show with the I Love Lucy star. Since then, Arnaz has certainly paved her own way, participating in most theatrical productions. It’s something that her mother would commend considering that she loved the theatre.
Now, Lucie Arnaz continues to act and is also helping out a new film, Being the Ricardos, with accurately capturing the lives of her parents. But no matter what she does, she consistently proves that she’s more than just a celebrity’s daughter.
